Greg Veis, YouTube Hunter: MLK Day Edition

BY

January 16, 2007

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Martin Luther King, Jr., said that*, but you're going to hear presidential candidate Obama repeat it more than a few times over the next year. You'll also hear him say that it doesn't bend itself. Undeniably true, and the reason why days like yesterday are important. Sure, Martin Luther King Day is a fantastic opportunity to reacquaint yourself with a Nintendo habit--the Hunter watched a dizzying amount of 24--but, at the risk of eye roll-inducing earnestness, it's also a call for reflection. How much pressure are you applying to the arc? Do the times call for more? How much more? And how much more are you willing to stomach before the sacrifices
become too great?

Easy questions they're not, and the Hunter won't pretend to answer them for you. But it's worth revisiting Dr. King to help answer them for yourself. There are scores of speeches to choose from--many
YouTube-able--but the one provided below is a favorite. Dr. King gave it at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1967, almost a year before his death, and it marks a significant departure from his oratories of only a few years earlier. He'd expanded his scope by now, finding injustice not just in the diners and drinking fountains of the South, but in our Vietnam war policy and in a national value system that championed the material over the lasting, the sectional over the ecumenical. The speech is proof
that Dr. King was moving towards becoming a different sort of man--not as immediately palatable to most Americans, but bolder, with a wider ranging message. He was acting like a man who didn't accept the narrow mandate of Racial Leader, but wanted to address ills far beyond the ones he had
initially set out to heal. There's no telling what he could've done in a natural lifetime, if his new messages would've took, or if he would've been shuffled aside and snickered at as a man who had outlived his time.
We're poorer for that. But we still have his words, and if you have 20 minutes in the next few days, give this a watch:

*King actually cribbed the line from Theodore Parker, the Transcendentalist and Unitarian minister.

Netflix might know your TV habits better than you do. Recently, the entertainment company's normally tight-lipped number-crunchers looked at user data collected between November 1, 2016 and November 1, 2017 to see which series people were powering through and which ones they were digesting more slowly. By analyzing members’ average daily viewing habits, they were able to determine which programs were more likely to be “binged” (or watched for more than two hours per day) and which were more often “savored” (or watched for less than two hours per day) by viewers.

They found that the highest number of Netflix bingers glutted themselves on the true crime parody American Vandal, followed by the Brazilian sci-fi series 3%, and the drama-mystery 13 Reasons Why. Other shows that had viewers glued to the couch in 2017 included Anne with an E, the Canadian series based on L. M. Montgomery's 1908 novelAnne of Green Gables, and the live-action Archie comics-inspired Riverdale.

In contrast, TV shows that viewers enjoyed more slowly included the Emmy-winning drama The Crown, followed by Big Mouth, Neo Yokio, A Series of Unfortunate Events, GLOW, Friends from College, and Ozark.

There's a dark side to this data, though: While the company isn't around to judge your sweatpants and the chip crumbs stuck to your couch, Netflix is privy to even your most embarrassing viewing habits. The company recently used this info to publicly call out a small group of users who turned their binges into full-fledged benders:

To the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?

Oh, and if you're the one person in Antarctica binging Shameless, the streaming giant just outed you, too.

Netflix broke down their full findings in the infographic below and, Big Brother vibes aside, the data is pretty fascinating. It even includes survey data on which shows prompted viewers to “Netflix cheat” on their significant others and which shows were enjoyed by the entire family.